A Letter to My Lego Robtotics Team

A Letter to my Lego Robotics Team

Dear Brick Builders:

This past Saturday, we spent 8 hours together in a hot, crowded gymnasium at North Quincy High School. The FIRST Lego League Quincy Qualifier was the culmination of seven weeks of your hard work. I say "your" because you ten boys did every ounce of work. That's what FLL is all about: kids do all the work, with guidance and encouragement from their coaches.

When we first met, we were ten boys and three moms in a classroom. Saturday, we entered the gym as a team. The definition of that word is "...a number of persons associated together in work or activity." While that applies to your effort, it doesn't begin to scratch the surface of your accomplishment.

Let me recap everything you achieved over the seven weeks. You worked together to build our FLL Field, an obstacle course of Lego components that included a bridge, a truck on a ramp, several walls, barrels and that dreaded dynamometer. (Did any of you know what a dynamometer was before this? I didn't).

You designed and built a Lego robot. Right up until an hour before your first match, you were making modifications to the wheels and the attachments. You pooled your good ideas together to create the robot, debating the merits of front motors versus rear motors, a fixed wheel versus a swiveling wheel. Everyone had an opinion on what might work and you respected that. You never said words like "That won't work" or "That's a dumb idea." Instead, you weighed the pros and cons and together decided what worked best.

You learned how to program that robot, and discovered that it didn’t always perform the way you wanted it to. How many times did you go back to the computer, making tiny changes to your program? One hundred? Five hundred? As a team, you didn't get discouraged or give up. You kept working until the last minutes of the last class. You learned perseverance.

When it came to our research project, you voted on everything from our team name to how we defined our community. You brought in lists of every possible type of transportation in our town and brainstormed ideas on how to make improvements. In the end, you chose teleportation as a solution. Other people might have dismissed that idea as science fiction, but you researched everything you could find on the subject and discovered that scientists are making advances in the field. You wrote an extremely funny commercial for a teleporter, incorporating all the ways that teleportation could improve our lives. When it came time to present your project to the judges, you boldly assembled in front of the classroom and performed flawlessly.

Throughout the long, exhausting day, you held it together. When it was time to put the robot through its paces, you stood in pairs at the mission table, in front of hundreds of cheering spectators, and calmly ran your mission. You graciously let every team member who wanted to take a turn at the table have one. When you weren't running a mission, you were on the sidelines, wearing your tie-dye team shirts proudly. My fondest memory is seeing your group, at the top of the bleachers, shaking your bodies to the music and cheering on not just Hanover, but teams from all over the region. (Of course when it was Hanover's turn, you cheered the loudest.) Although our team didn't win an award, you cheered for the Hanover Middle School team that did. You knew that a win for any Hanover team was a win for all of us.

You learned a lot these last seven weeks. Did you know that I learned something too? Yes, I learned about robots and programming and all the rules of the competition. But I also learned that you can take ten kids with wildly different personalities, encourage them to think big, ask them to respect each other, get them to tap into their creative abilities and have them come out the other side as a team to be reckoned with. You taught me that you don't necessarily need to play music to be a rock star.

Your assistant coaches, Mrs. Marriner and Mrs. Courtney, invested more than just their time. They invested their encouragement, patience, and enthusiasm. They deserve a medal too.

Your team reminds me of the 2004 Red Sox. No matter where you go from this point, no matter what future team you may join, no matter what your achievements might be, when I see one of you I will remember the incredible team I had the pleasure to coach for seven weeks in the fall of 2009. Thank you.

Your Coach,
Mrs. Anderson